RDI britelite (sun IPX portable)

shickapooka800 · Guru Joined: 05 Dec 2004 Posts: 304 Location: no

I just got 2 of these wonderful machines, and i am in the process of assesing what i need and beginning a migration to linux from their previous installs of SunOS.

The main unit (the other is a parts unit) has an i486 DX accelerator card on it (its in the sbus(?) expansion slot next to the LCD driver expxansion board. Am I to understand that this is a 486 chip that is sharring some duties with the SPARC chip in the board already? If so, is this a mixing of archetectures that might prove hard to work with in installing Gentoo (or netbsd, which might be my best option right now)?

If nobody is familiar with the comp: it is basically a SUN IPX, with an LCD driver board, and a Type4 keyboard crammed into one box, with a large ass battery and an LCD (its a 15lb laptop).

Also, I need to look more into the typical PROM problems I am having (in the process of figureing out if its completely dead or just borked). Will I be able to install linux on it, and ignore the PROM issues, and just manually use ifconfig to set my non-existent MAC add.?

shickapooka800 · Guru Joined: 05 Dec 2004 Posts: 304 Location: no

jesus, i have never seen a thread get 27 'views' and not one single answer?!

anyway, for those who give a rats ass, i am having a great deal of trouble booting netbsd by means of floppy on this machine. it always hangs on the first floppy when it is loading the kernel -- i get an 'error = 79' message. Is this error message from the netbsd floppy or from the sun boot prompt?

also has anyone ever tried aurora linux? i hav both the boot and initrd disks, but it never asks me for the initrd, yet it fails to boot because 'initrd is not found.'

I need an external cd-rom i think (i hate floppies with every inch of my being).

GenTimJS · Guru Joined: 03 May 2003 Posts: 406 Location: NH, USA

About that 486 chip ...

Before the days of SunPCI sun made simmilar "486DX" sbus boards which gave you a 486 co-processor which could be used to run dos/win3.1 nativly rather than under emulation.

Only supported in solaris. Only supported in -ancient- solaris. Good lucking making it go ;-)

IF however, you did make it go (in linux or solaris or whatever) it would likely be well suited for retro gaming. I have a sunpci model 1 in my SB1000 which runs my old games quite nicely :-D

_________________
-Tim Smith

shickapooka800 · Guru Joined: 05 Dec 2004 Posts: 304 Location: no

wow, thanks for the resposne, i had no idea what the sbus card was for... and now i am very interested.

i am a complete solaris/sparc amateur, and i want more information on this ancient solaris and the like. Do you happen to have any links or extra info on your experience with this. you mentioned the retro games on your old machine, so i assume you might have some links or something that might be of use (or a detailed email....

)

thanks alot for your response.

shickapooka800 · Guru Joined: 05 Dec 2004 Posts: 304 Location: no

oh also,
I can't seem to boot a netbsd (or gentoo) kernel (for different reason though i suspect). could it be the RDI framebuffer and the lcd driver board? or is there a boot time argument i would need to pass for the 486 expansion card (i should just take the thing out and see if it will boot).

shickapooka800 · Guru Joined: 05 Dec 2004 Posts: 304 Location: no

ok wait, did you mean 'ancient' as in sunos 2.x ? I have been looking for this OS for ever (the machine is password protected right now). Can I download it? if not are there laws governing me getting a copy? I wouldn't mind buying a copy if i could just find one...

GenTimJS · Guru Joined: 03 May 2003 Posts: 406 Location: NH, USA

Re: The 486 sbus adaptor
Sun almost doesnt even admit this thing exists. Back before sunsolve became pay-for-the-good-stuff, I was browsing the category for my SunPCI 1 (which has a 400mhz amd k6-2) and noticed the Sun 486DX (or something like that) and looked at it. I have an ultra1, which they are compatible with, so I was curious and poked around. There was --very-- little info on these, and I get the impression they didnt sell too well.
Like I said, good luck making it go ;-)

Also note that simply having this in --should-- not make any differance towards things working/not-working .. you just wont have the drivers for it, so it will look like any other driver-less card to the system.

Re: Old SunOS
Download, almost certainly not.
Find install CDs for on ebay cheap, most likely. Just ebay for "solaris" .. you'll be suprised at how much random crap comes up, mixed in with the occasional outdated solaris media set. Possibly try a search for "sunos" for the -real- old floppy sets :-)

Re: BSDs on old old sparc
One of my pals uses NetBSD on a sparc IPX as his home gateway/router (and has an sbus PCMCIA adaptor which is SUPPORTED under bsd! and thus via use of a wireless card, his IPX also serves as a wireless access point) and mentioned the archaic install process he had to suffer. I dont remember the specifics, but I remember it involved several floppies and NFS stuff. Wish I could be more help there.
_________________
-Tim Smith